Fundamentals Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Correct answer: Register

A register is a group of flip-flops holding one word, each flip-flop storing one bit. Adding logic to make them count gives a counter, and adding logic to shift the pattern along gives a shift register - both are registers with something extra.

Answer: B

Correct answer: 1837

Charles Babbage conceived the Analytical Engine in 1837. It anticipated nearly everything in a modern computer - a mill for arithmetic, a store for numbers, punched-card input, and conditional branching - but it was never built in his lifetime. His earlier Difference Engine dates from the 1820s.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Computing Tabulating Recording Co.

IBM began in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, formed by merging three firms - one of them Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company, whose punched-card equipment had processed the 1890 United States census. It was renamed International Business Machines in 1924.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Both a & b

A program has to satisfy two readers. The machine must be able to execute it, so it must obey the language’s rules exactly; and the programmer must be able to read it, since it will have to be understood and changed later. The user never sees it - only what it does.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Information

Data that has been arranged, processed and given context becomes information - something meaningful to the person receiving it. A field is one item within a record, and a file a collection of records.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Address bus

A bus is the set of parallel conductors joining the processor to memory and to the other units. The address bus carries the location being referred to, and its width sets how much memory can be addressed - 16 lines allow 64 KB, 32 lines allow 4 GB. The data bus carries the values themselves and the control bus the timing signals.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Automatic

Automatic operation is the ability to carry a job through from start to finish once it has been set going - no operator needed between steps. It follows from the stored-program principle: the machine fetches its own next instruction. Accuracy, reliability and versatility are separate qualities.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Bus arbitration

Bus arbitration pins decide which device may drive the bus at any moment, so that two masters never attempt to use it at once. Without arbitration, simultaneous drivers would corrupt the data and could damage the drivers themselves.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Magnetic drum

The magnetic drum was used as primary storage in early machines - a rotating cylinder with fixed heads, holding the program and data the processor worked on directly. Hard disks, floppies and the rest are secondary storage: the processor cannot execute from them, so their contents must be loaded into main memory first.

Answer: B

Correct answer: IBM 1401

The IBM 1401 was the first computer brought to Nepal, imported in 1971 (2028 BS) for processing the national census. It was a second-generation transistorised machine and by then already elderly, but it did the work.